“These were the fossils Ruben found in the garden the other day. I was sure that they’re fossils because you see?” He traced his finger along frond-shaped imprints possessed by over half of the rocks, haunted by the ghosts of prehistoric ferns. “I just felt a great curiosity in knowingwhatthese fossils may be, and what worth they may have.”
Jane removed her spectacles from her purse and placed them on the tip of her nose (more to give her a scholarly air than practicality) before she took one of the fossils and held it up so she could better observe it in the light. The rock was dusty and gray amidst the bright pink fingers of her glove, and within itwere the pale brown imprints of several fish-like skeletons. They were fish, yes, but what kind of fish? Was it even a fossil, or just a hundred-year-old bone? Was it one or many species of fish, eternally trapped together on the surface of a piece of loam? Jane ran her thumb over it just as her tongue did over her lips as she set the rock back on the desk.
When she turned, Terence and Mrs. Foster were looking at her almost expectantly. She took off her glasses to tap them against the heel of her palm. “I’ll see what I can do! I must warn you that I don’t possess nearly as much knowledge as my father does, and I hope my mother’s enthusiasm hasn’t raised your expectations or spirits too high.”
“And I hope that you do not feel this task is too perilous or dire,” Terence said.
Jane wanted to laugh. He spoke as though she were to undergo some grave quest rather than inspecting meager rocks.
“As I’ve previously explained, I am merely interested in these stones’ identities for my own chance to learn, and I was too afraid of risking damage to them during transport. If your identifications happen to be incorrect, then it may be a chance for both of us to learn,” he said as he ghosted his hand over the aligned rocks. He breathed a raspy chuckle as he then rubbed his brow. “I apologize, this all seems silly. I never anticipated having you come all this way out here to look at bloodyrocks.”
“It is no trouble, truly,” Jane said and patted his shoulder, almost mirroring the friendly action she observed him share with Ruben. “I would much rather be occupied like this than be trapped in a hotel room with my mother in a city neither of us knows what to do in. Besides, all she would be doing is her watercolors. Have you ever been forced to endure the horrors of hours upon hours of watercolors? And in total silence, mind you! No music, not evenhumming or chit-chat.”
“Sounds horrible,” he sighed and scrubbed his hands against the thighs of his trousers. “I appreciate your enthusiasm, Jane. Now, I’m unsure of how much time you will require for your work, but this house is as much yours as it is mine in the meantime. We’re like family here, and I ensure that guests are no exception.”
Jane tried to maintain her smile as she tapped her glasses harder against her hand. As much as she appreciated the gesture, she worried he was overcompensating for something, but what that was she didn’t know, and that made her uneasy the same way his silence in the carriage did. What had happened to the confident, soft-spoken Terence she had spoken to just yesterday?
As the idol watched over the three of them, sweat prickled at her collar.
“There’s no need to worry yourself so. I’m grateful for the opportunity you’ve given me, Mr. Hayes,” she took the moment to put on her glasses and push them up her nose using her knuckle, as a point of emphasis. “Let us get started, then, shall we?”
Jane’s back ached from being hunched over the desk for what felt like too long of hours and her eyes burned from looking between the rocks and her father’s books she’d brought with her. She had tried to have the habit of bringing one of the textbooks her father authored with her whenever she traveled, whether it be if she happened across an enthusiastic supporter of her father’s in search of a signed copy or if she were bored and sought entertainment.
The Sterling Field Guide to Bygone Botanyby Zelda Lizbeth Lemke-Sterling & Dr. Simon Howard Sterling, Ph.D., D. Sc., D.G.S. was a comprehensive manual, of sorts, as Dr. Sterling liked to describe it. It was a simple listing of known prehistoric flora (as of 1903), where they were discovered and by whom, and potential descendants in the modern world. Alongside descriptions were various illustrations, of both fossilized plants and hypothetical imaginings of what these things may have looked like in life, all done in Mrs. Sterling’s ink etchings. Along the bottom margins of some pages were her footnotes justifying the creative reasonings behind her illustrations.
It was a passion project between man and wife, and in a way, it made Jane envious that such a thing could be born of passion and union, and still be celebrated despite a woman’s name being the first one seen on the cover. Jane always held a residual envy regarding the endeavors of her mother and sisters; men wanted women with artistic talent, not intelligence. They wanted a thing to entertain them, make their hours pass by, not to challenge or outwit them. That was why Jane had come to cherish Terence’s company: he listened. He remained quiet, never curling his lip in distaste, when she spoke. Such silence was encouraging in its rarity, and his kindness even more so. Even if he were a little awkward.
Terence attempted to give her space as she worked but she could feel the schoolboy’s curiosity radiating from him whenever he lingered in the sitting room’s doorway or entered the room to ask if she needed another cup of tea every five minutes. During several of those trips, he stepped just close enough to peek her over her shoulder, close enough that his breath disturbed the hair over her ear before Jane would smirk and hunch over to shield her notes from him.
“Ah! Naughty boy! No peeking!”
At the sound of her cackle, he’d rush from the room with heavy steps. She would soon lapse back into silence when her laughter echoed back to her in empty mockery. The house didn’t seem to take kindly to merriment.
She at least appreciated Terence’s little game of curiosity. His audience was certainly preferred over that of utter silence and the idol that leered at her from atop the mantle. As much as she wished to study it, she found that she couldn’t look upon the idol for too long before her neck turned clammy and an ache blossomed in the fingertips that brushed against it. She lacked the courage to ask Terence where he acquired such an ugly heirloom.
The third time Terence entered the room, he didn’t approach her from behind. Instead, Jane heard him fumbling with something, which was followed by a strange sound that she could only describe as a plastic, rubbery vacuuming of air. When she finally looked over her shoulder to investigate, the crackling twang of a harpsichord and violin duet filled the air, belched forth from the maw of a phonograph Terence stood beside in the room’s shadowed corner. He held a cylindrical holding container in his hands as he looked between the phonograph and Jane.
“I thought you’d appreciate Bach over silence,” he said. “He is a personal favorite of mine. A better symphony than rain on windows, I’d imagine.”
Jane was enamored with the phonograph as she watched the wax cylinder spin, and her brain tried to puzzle how a needle tracing its etchings could produce such music. She desperately wished to know how it worked, just as she wished to know how bones fit and operated within a dinosaur.
Until now, Jane had never been in the presence of a phonograph. Or, well, at least one that was operational. She’d see them in the homes of her father’s acquaintances in the morerespectable suburbs of Milwaukee, like Downer Woods, where polished streets shone with golden lamps and cobbled stones that glimmered in their cleanliness.
Terence suddenly looked down, brow pinched and mouth tight, when he must’ve misinterpreted her awed silence for displeasure. “I-If you’d wish to change it I’ve the music of Liszt, Vivaldi, Dvorák, Bizet, Grieg, Beethoven—”
“Terence, I assure you, Bach is fine enough,” Jane said, rising from her chair so that she may approach the phonograph. Her body popped and cracked as she stretched, grateful for the chance to at last move. She didn’t daretouchthe device, but she did ghost her fingers over its tonearm, the horn that vibrated with music. “I’ve just never seen one of these things work before. Y’know, my father once owned one. Never had a chance to work it, though.”
“Oh? How come?”
“Back home, each of us sisters has a pet: Meredith has Patroclus the hound, Emmy has her daughters Titania and Ophelia, and I suppose her husband Ethan is enough of a pet, and I have Mr. Thompson. He’s this orange tom I found in our rubbish a couple years back, and he has a proclivity to hunt and chase, but only after dust bunnies. Would be a cold day in Hell before he’d be a proper cat and hunt a bird.
“So, anyway, you see, he had been chasing one of those dust bunnies through Father’s study when his tail knocked into the leg of the stand holding the phonograph and then—” Jane mimicked an explosion with her hands, “Crash! Thing broke into a thousand shards! It broke in ways I never thought it possible for wood and metal to break! It truly was an epic mess; words alone fail to do it justice.”
As she told her story, Terence had taken a seat in one of the armchairs, leaning forward, chin held in a hand supported on hisknee. “Oh, how dreadful… I can’t imagine the rage he must’ve felt.”
“Oh, of course, he wasfurious. Twenty dollars lay shattered on his study floor, and not once did he have a chance to play any of his cylinders—which he paid about ten bucks a piece for, y’know!” Jane seated herself on the arm of the loveseat adjacent to Terence, her back to the dwindling fireplace—and the idol’s burning stare. “That evening he burst into my room, Mr. Thompson hiding on my lap, and he declared—” she put her hands on her hips and puffed out her chest, broadening her shoulders, in a crude caricature of her father. She puckered her lips, trying to feign the image of his black-and-silver bottlebrush mustache, and bellowed in a nasal baritone, “‘Janie! Your wretched little flea-bitten nuisance has cost me a fortune! He owes me a new phonograph, that heathen! Send him to find work as a mouser, for he shall forever be in debt with me!’”
Terence chuckled, muffling his smirk behind a broad hand. “What of Mr. Thompson’s debt? Does he still owe your father?”
